Standardized testing is prevalent in the United States today. Such testing is used for higher education entrance examinations and achievement testing at the primary and secondary school levels. The prevalence of standardized testing in the United States has been further bolstered by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which emphasizes nationwide test-based assessment of student achievement.
Traditional multiple-choice assessment examinations contain one or more sections, each including a series of questions. An assessment examination presents several answer choices (i.e., A, B, C, D, etc.) for each question. An examinee is instructed to determine the best answer from the set of choices and indicate his or her choice on an answer sheet. The answer sheet presents lists of answer areas. Each answer area pertains to one question and contains a row of answer spaces. Each answer space corresponds to one of the answer choices. A typical method for indicating an answer is to darken an answer space corresponding to the answer by marking it with a pencil. Changing an answer requires an examinee to erase the initial pencil mark in one space and to mark another. The spaces are typically either ovals or rectangles.
Traditional answer sheets have the advantage of being formatted in such a way that they are easily recognized by answer scanning machines. This is because traditional answer sheets are mass-produced and the layout of such sheets can be loaded into the scanning machine.
However, because traditional answer sheets are not customized to the assessment examination for which they are used, the number of spaces on an answer sheet for a given question often does not match the number of responses for that question. Moreover, additional answer areas or sections are often present on traditional answer sheets. Such additional areas, sections and/or spaces can confuse an examinee and lead to incorrectly marked answers.
In an effort to solve this problem, custom-designed answer sheets can be generated for particular assessment examinations. Such answer sheets may be designed to have the correct number of sections, answer areas and answer spaces for a given assessment examination. Typically, such answer sheets are not cost effective unless the number of examinees is large. Additionally, the creation of customized answer sheets requires expert skills in form design and software programming.
What is needed is a method and system for producing low cost custom-designed answer sheets for assessment examinations.
A further need exists for a method and system for automatically encoding an answer sheet with information identifying the examinee and/or the assessment examination.
A further need exists for a method and system for configuring image processing software to process such answer sheets having been scanned.
A further need exists for a method and system for providing a user interface to display the scanned image of the answer sheet to permit an evaluator to score an examination.
A further need exists for a method and system for evaluating the amount of confidence in the results of image processing and presenting this information to permit an evaluator to correct processing errors.
The present invention is directed to solving one or more of the above-listed problems.